The economy of Mongolia, a country rich in natural resources, is increasingly dependent upon the mining sector. International prices of mining commodities have been highly volatile in recent years. This paper uses a computable general equilibrium model to examine the short-term effects on the Mongolian economy of two scenarios: (1) a moderate boom in the coal market; and (2) a drop in the world price of metal ores. It is found that the Dutch disease effect generated by the shocks is insignificant given the structure of the economy (e.g., small export shares and low export intensity of manufacturing and agriculture commodities) and a labor market condition with high unemployment. Since the economy is largely dependent upon on the mining sector, the impacts of the shocks are jarring, implying that the government must abide by its fiscal rules for stable growth and prosperity.

This paper explains the puzzling fact that in organizing the management of surface water, village leaders have provided incentives to canal managers in some areas, but not in all. Our study indicates that the optimal contractual choice depends on the relative abilities of the leader and the manager, the design of the cultivated land, the characteristics of the canal system and the opportunity costs of the leader and the pool of managerial candidates. The unifying mechanism is the relative change in the ability of the leader and manager to perform the unmarketable activities that are needed to provide irrigation services.

A choice experiment was applied to measure the existence value of an endemic moss. We assessed value separation, embedding or warm glow and ‘ethical’ motivations. We exemplify our application by valuing an inconspicuous moss endemic to Chile's sub-Antarctic region. The choice experiment was administered to a sample of local residents of Navarino Island (southern Chile). The design isolates the existence value by requiring respondents to make simultaneous tradeoffs between moss existence value, five other biodiversity-related values and income changes. Insensitivity to scope was addressed by using degrees of extinction risks. We predominantly use a willingness-to-accept design of the payment vehicle to avoid protest responses. A meaningful marginal value for the existence of an endemic species for Navarino island residents was documented. The design, based on varying degrees of extinction risk, avoided a strong effect of warm glow. No protest responses motivated by ethical concerns were encountered.

This paper introduces a household model of private investment in storm protection under an endogenous risk framework to determine how defensive self-protection and self-insurance expenditures by coastal households to mitigate storm-inflicted damages are affected by the availability of public programs and the presence of a mangrove forest. The theoretical results show that publicly constructed physical barriers and mangroves encourage self-protection but discourage self-insurance expenditures. However, public disaster relief and rehabilitation programs lead to the crowding-out of self-protection but the crowding-in of self-insurance. Our empirical analysis of coastal households in Bangladesh impacted by Cyclone Sidr reveals partial support for the crowding-out and crowding-in effects of public investments and programs. Households located in a mangrove-protected area invest more in self-protection and less in self-insurance. Other controls, such as household socio-economic characteristics, also influence and add a degree of complexity to the relationship.

This paper empirically investigates the effect of energy use on economic growth throughout different stages of development. Along with direct effects, energy is allowed to influence income growth indirectly by capital accumulation through input substitution. We find that energy use affects economic growth primarily through the capital channel and that this result varies substantially with regard to the country's income level. For middle-income countries including the quintet of large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – an increase in energy use drives capital accumulation, which favors economic growth. On the contrary, for high-income countries, a higher energy input tends to withdraw productive resources from capital accumulation, harming economic growth. Considering these differences, policy measures aiming at restricting energy consumption should be evaluated against the background of a region's stage of economic development.

Livestock health is economically important for agropastoral households whose wealth is held partly as livestock. Households can invest in disease prevention and treatment, but livestock disease risk is also affected by grazing practices that result in inter-herd contact and disease transmission in regions with endemic communicable diseases. This paper examines the relationships between communal grazing and antimicrobial use in Maasai, Chagga and Arusha households in northern Tanzania. We develop a theoretical model of the economic connection between communal grazing, disease transmission risk, risk perceptions, and antimicrobial use, and derive testable hypotheses about these connections. Regression results suggest that history of disease and communal grazing are associated with higher subjective disease risk and greater antimicrobial use. We discuss the implications of these results in light of the potential for relatively high inter-herd disease transmission rates among communal grazers and potential contributions to antimicrobial resistance due to antimicrobial use.

We apply the target revenue model, a version of prospect theory, to investigate how fishermen adjust their trip length to changes in daily revenue. The key finding is that certain groups of fishermen seem more likely to behave according to the target revenue model rather than to the standard model of labor supply. We also find that vessel capacity has little effect on whether the captains seek target revenue. The study strongly supports the integration of prospect theory into the framework of labor supply analysis.

This essay introduces a special section of this issue containing a set of papers on the dynamics of coupled human and natural systems. We frame this introduction by setting out some of the major issues confronting researchers who wish to incorporate both economic and biophysical dynamics in their analysis. We contrast the three papers contained in this section in terms of how they respond to these different issues. We conclude that these papers provide important new insights on both how to model and analyze dynamic coupled human and natural systems and how to define policies that will lead to improved human well being and environmental conditions.

A diverse body of empirical literature recognizes that investment can influence tenure security, yet this phenomenon has rarely been examined analytically. This paper develops a theoretical model that demonstrates explicitly conditions under which the probability of eviction is endogenous to investment undertaken on illegally encroached land. By accommodating explicitly the government's objective function and its ability to commit credibly to an eviction policy, the model reveals why both those farmers who under-invest, and those who raise their investment levels to improve tenure security, may be behaving rationally. Indeed, both types of behaviour are accommodated within a single model.

Solid fuel burning in households is a leading health risk for people in developing countries. Several studies of indoor air pollution from solid fuels have analyzed the problem at the village and household level, but to design effective policies it is important to understand the large-scale socioeconomic drivers of household air pollution (HAP). Using county-level data covering all of China, we examine relationships between socioeconomic variables and ambient concentrations of PM and SO2 resulting from household energy use. Applying both non-parametric and parametric techniques, we find that income and education are robust determinants of HAP; structural characteristics affect the HAP turning points; and the poorest counties bear a disproportionate amount of total pollution, especially urban counties and counties located in the coastal provinces.

This study estimates Indonesian households’ carbon emissions that are attributed to their expenditures in 2005 and 2009 to analyze the pattern, distribution and drivers of their carbon footprint. Employing an input-output-emission-expenditure framework, the authors find a significant difference in household carbon emissions between different affluence levels, regions and educational levels. They also find that, while many household characteristics influence emissions, total expenditure is by far the most important determinant of household emissions, both across households and over time. Consequently, emissions inequality is very similar to expenditure inequality across households. The decomposition analysis confirms that changes in emissions are predominantly due to rising expenditures between the two periods, while expenditure elasticities analysis suggests that the rise in household emissions is mainly caused by the overall rise in total household expenditure, and not by shifting consumption shares among consumption categories. The paper discusses policy options for Indonesia to reduce this very strong expenditure–emissions link.

Successful economic growth in Chile based on open market and export strategy, is characterized by a high dependence on natural resources, and by polluting production and consumption patterns. There is an increasing concern about the need to make potentially significant trade-offs between economic growth and environmental improvements. Additionally, policy makers have been reluctant to impose standards that could have regressive consequences, making the poor poorer. Using the CGE model ECOGEM-Chile we study the direct and indirect effects of imposing environmental taxes in Chile for PM-10 as well as taxes on fuels. We analyze the effects over macroeconomic variables as well as sectoral, distributive, and environmental variables. The results show that the most significant impacts are on emissions and sectoral outputs. There are winners and losers. Macroeconomic and distributional impacts are low when low emission reductions are required, however they can be significant if a 50% reduction in emissions are imposed.

Optimal pollution control is an important challenge for sustainable development with three distinct cases. First, the situation where nature's assimilative capacity is completely destroyed involves normative problems that require further research. Second, environmental restoration with initial pollution above the steady-state stock requires an economy to initially allocate a relatively high share of its resources to cleaning-up activities. In return, this generally results in an intertemporally efficient development path that is both environmentally and economically sustainable. Third, optimal trajectories in situations with initial stocks of pollution below the long-term optimum generally imply an increase in pollution and a decline of optimal consumption. In this case, the investment of the environmental rents accruing from nature's assimilative capacity into man-made capital is required in analogy to the famous Hartwick rule to maintain a constant flow of instantaneous welfare. This would facilitate growth in consumption sufficient to compensate for the rising disutility of pollution.

The choice of appropriate discount rate for comparing the long-term health benefits of policies is a complex issue. This study contributes to this sparsely researched issue from the perspective of developing countries by estimating the implicit discount rate that workers reveal through their willingness to incur death risks on-the-job and quantity-adjusted value of life of workers using an original data set from the Indian labor market. The estimated real discount rate ranges from 7.6 to 9.7 per cent, which is closer to the financial market rate for the study period and consistent with earlier studies from developed nations. The estimated value of life ranges are Rs. 24.3–26.5 (US $1.34–1.47) million. The results of the study can aid policy makers, international agencies, and researchers in evaluating health projects in India and other developing nations.

The exact specification and motivation for an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC)is the subject of a vast literature in environmental economics. A remarkablydiverse set of econometric approaches and candidate regressors have beenproposed, which highlights the degree of model uncertainty surrounding therelationship between environmental quality and pollution. We introduce Bayesianmodel averaging (BMA) to the EKC analysis to examine: (a) whether a sulphurdioxide EKC exists, and if so (b) which income/pollution specification issupported by the data. BMA addresses model uncertainty as part of the empiricalstrategy by incorporating the uncertainty about the validity of competingtheories into the posterior distribution. We find only weak support for an EKC,which disappears altogether when we address issues relating to the extremeoversampling of two industrialized countries in the sample. In contrast, ourresults highlight the relative importance of political economy and site-specificvariables (specifically executive constraints and precipitation variation) inexplaining pollution outcomes. Trade is shown to play an important indirectrole, as it moderates the influence of the composition effect on pollution.

This article uses the welfare foundations for the usual net domestic product (NDP) income measure of the traditional National Accounts System (NAS) provided by Weitzman (1976, 2000), and the propositions of Hartwick (1993) and Hamilton (1994a) to correct this measure in order to obtain a green (sustainable) measure of economic income. It estimates green measures of the economic income of Chile's mining sector for the period 1977–1996. Different methodologies regarding the valuation of mining resources are employed, and exploration expenditures in the mining sector are included to empirically estimate the green measures of income. The results clearly show that the usual income measures of the traditional NAS overestimated the economic income generated by the Chilean mining sector during the period by 20–40 per cent, and its rate of growth by 3–20 per cent. Moreover, this overestimation has increased in recent years. These empirical results are remarkably similar when different methodologies are used to calculate green measures of the mining sector's economic income. The empirical evidence produced in this work, together with the one provided by other studies, leads to the conclusion that Chile's outstanding recent economic growth has not delivered the amount of economic income recorded by its NAS, since a significant part of it corresponded to depreciation of the country's natural capital.

Land is an essential factor of production. Institutions that govern its efficient use determine the sustainability of this essential resource. In Ethiopia all land is publicly owned. Such an institutional setting is said to have resulted in the major degradation of Ethiopia's land resources and dissipation of the resource rent. An alternative to this is assigning a private property institution. In this paper, we examine the consumer welfare effects of a change in the institutional setting on communal forest and grazing lands, using a cross-section data set of 200 households in Northern Ethiopia. Findings suggest that changing the current institutional setting could indeed be welfare reducing.

I am in agreement with the main thesis of the paper by Levin et al., namely that complex, non-linear systems, whether ecological or socioeconomic, do not lend themselves to management protocols based on assumptions of linear, globally stable, single equilibrium systems. As the authors point out, policy makers need a better understanding of the concept of resilience. Furthermore, it is especially important for them to understand the crucial elements for maintaining resilience in the integrated ecological-socioeconomic resource use systems (the forests, rangelands, and agro-ecosystems) on which most human welfare depends.

A better understanding of the relative importance of factors related to climate change and to changes associated with economic growth would serve to inform water policy and to focus scarce public resources on anticipated problems arising from distinct sources of changes in water demand. This article investigates the determinants of residential water consumption in Chile, a developing country that has seen noteworthy changes in incomes, household size, poverty rates and levels of urbanization, and which is projected to experience significant climatic but varied changes, depending on the region of the country. Panel data for 1998-2010 at the municipal level is used to analyze the sensitivity of residential water demand to climate and development-related factors. In the case of Chile, the effect on water consumption of these development-related changes is estimated to be several times that of the changes associated with climate projections for 50 to 80 years in the future.